Friday of the 22nd Week in Course 2025 (St. Teresa of Calcutta)
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” That is how St. John the Evangelist said it, and we can be so grateful that it’s essentially what Paul wrote, “Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
St. Paul calling Him the “firstborn of all creation” does not mean Jesus was a creature. That was the heresy of Arius. He was firstborn, the perfect image of the Father, but He was and is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” All creation came into being through Him. So the Son cannot be part of the created order.
But the Son of God took flesh in the Virgin Mary, and so He had the fullness of human nature. Because He was both God and man, He could empty Himself of His glory and offer Himself as a sacrifice to make peace between God and man by the Blood of His cross. We are human and so through faith, in baptism, we can partake of Christ’s death and offering, becoming other Christs for this world today.
This plan just burst the mental capacity of the first-century Pharisee, who didn’t understand why the disciples of John fasted, and those of Jesus did not. Jesus presented Himself to them as the Divine Bridegroom readying His disciples for the wedding feast. Why did that offend the Pharisees and scribes so much? Because the OT, especially in the prophets Isaiah and Hosea, envisioned YHWH/Adonai as the bridegroom and the people of Israel as the bride. When Jesus went further and compared His teaching and His mission to wine being poured out into a wineskin, they knew He was talking about their rites and teaching systems, which could not expand to accommodate the rites and teachings of Christ and the Church He was establishing. Jesus knew that there could be no compromise with the old sectarianism of Israel, and that they would, and did, conspire to murder Him.
Our psalmist today leads us in acclaiming the goodness, the chesed or loving kindness and the amunah or faithfulness of the Lord. We do make a mistake when we love the status quo so much that we cannot expand or adjust our thinking to the Word of God. The mistake is believing that God’s unchanging faithfulness is as procrustean as our habits. The very fact that God’s reality transcends our ability to understand His work means that we must always be ready to change our appreciation of Him. His unchanging love, entering into our ever-changing lives and worlds, can only be effective if we allow ourselves to expand our hearts and lives to try to love Him in return.
Those who have studied the life of the woman we celebrate today, St. Teresa of Calcutta, realize that she was always ready to expand her heart and life, and that of her religious congregation, the Missionaries of Charity. Only in that way could they bear effective witness not only to the indigent homeless they served, but to us self-satisfied moderns living in a society that considers unselfish, ever-giving love to be a waste.
